


dream of some epiphany

by ilvermoron



Category: Maximum Ride - James Patterson
Genre: F/M, Redemption, all the chapter titles are taylor swift lyrics, fang is bad at being a human, james patterson suck my entire ass, max is bad at being an angel, mentions of child death, this is really sad if you read into it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:27:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28273098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilvermoron/pseuds/ilvermoron
Summary: After committing one evil too many, con artist Fang gets his long-suffering guardian angel thrown out of the heavens. She's not too happy about that.
Relationships: Fang/Maximum "Max" Ride
Kudos: 4





	1. i think your house is haunted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ella Martinez isn't used to being an only child yet.

For years, the children said the mysterious red stain on the back wall of the park was her blood, though her body had been found half a mile down the river. They would dread walking past the drainage tunnel running below the jungle gym, warning their friends that if they lingered too long they would hear a girl crying in the darkness. Some even dared say that weird things always happened around her little sister, just a coincidence too many to be accidental. Maybe it was possible for a person to be haunted, just like a house.

But there was nothing special about those stories. Nothing at all. Children are children, toying with fear and shadows, eager to escape the bright shades of their past. Everybody wants to grow up. To a child, a dead girl isn’t a tragedy; a dead girl is a plaything for the shadowy bits of the brain. A dead girl is the beginning of a story. In a way, the children are right-- she is, absolutely, the beginning of this one. But, of course, not every story is true. It really was just wax on the wall, and just bats in the tunnels below the playground. But eight-year-old Ella Martinez always found an extra quarter on the ground by the vending machine after school (so she had enough for Oreos at the end of the week), and found her favorite seat on the bus empty every morning, and heard her pencil bag fall out of her backpack, causing her to pause, moments before a truck barrelled right through the crosswalk after school, and she believed.

Her sister wasn’t, and would never be, entirely gone.

Of course, she would never speak the thought to her mother. She had learned that it was better not to bring up her sister at all. Ella remembered the sound Mom made the night the police found her sister, and it sometimes haunted her worst dreams. She slept in Mom’s bed a lot, now-- it was better than being in a room with another empty bed in it, a bed where her big sister should be. 

She dreamed of her sister while she slept in her mother’s bed. In her mind, her sister waited for her. Every night, when she dreamed, she saw the hazy, yet familiar, scene of the elementary school playground. She saw the tunnel entrance they say she haunted, and she saw her sister, sitting on top of the monkey bars, swinging her boot-clad feet and tossing wood chips into the mouth of the slide. She had never fallen once. Ella could always see her clear as day, her jeans with the grass stains on the butt, her braid with wavy goldish brown waves beginning to spring loose. Her left boot zipper was broken, but she refused to stop wearing those boots. She claimed they were lucky.

Ella had never known her sister to be wrong, but she knew she’d been wearing those boots when she ran away that night. She remembered hearing the single zipper, then the soft swish of shoelaces against each other as she tied the broken one around her ankle. 

_ “Go back to sleep, El.” _

She had listened. Her sister was always right, and she would always believe her.

Just like how, in her dreams, she would swing down from the monkey bars and run up the hill to hug Ella, just like always. Her hair still smelled like sweat and peach cream shampoo. 

Ella didn’t know how to miss her sister when it still didn’t really feel like she was gone. She was still around, just… different. Now, she saw her when she slept, instead of the other way around. She wanted to ask Mom if she saw her, too, but… well, she didn’t like how Mom’s face crumpled whenever anyone mentioned her other daughter’s name. Ella didn’t want to say it, either.

For Ella, the world was upside down. She had been flung free from her sister’s orbit, and now had no one to follow. She didn’t feel like an only child. She felt like the younger sister, and she thought maybe she always would. Her sister was the kind of person who was impossible to ignore. Without her, thunderstorms were louder, sunshine wasn’t quite as warm, and the ground seemed miles further away on the monkey bars. She was gone, at least, from the real world-- and yet, everywhere she looked, Ella saw where Max should have been.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i just want to fill the void in my heart with angst about max, and i think that's valid. let me know if i made you sad because that's the goal.


	2. you'll be made of ashes, too

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a lost boy meets a lost girl.

Fang had only just crammed the hundred-dollar bill into the laptop case with everything else when he heard a crash, followed by the unmistakable sound of someone falling in the bathtub. His blood ran cold, hands scrambling to hide the money and retrieve his gun. Although Fang tried to convince himself that a tree had fallen, he knew the motel room was too far from the tree line for that to be true. Maybe it was a raccoon burrow falling through the motel roof.

That wasn’t reassuring. Gun in hand, Fang steeled his nerve and approached the bathroom. He had left the door cracked after taking a leak, but it wasn’t open enough to see anything. Fang watched with sharp eyes as he slowly rounded the corner, gun raised. He didn’t want to blow a raccoon’s head off, but he would. God knows the motel owners had seen weirder shit. He took a deep breath, mentally counted to three, and kicked the door open. 

There were no raccoons. There wasn’t even a fallen tree. There was just a strange girl, about his age, sprawled in the tub. Plaster covered her from head to toe.

He lowered the gun. “Who are you?” Fang asked indignantly. He worked hard to keep his voice even to avoid showing how stunned he was. It worked, for the most part. The gun in his hands helped.

The girl in the tub looked just as shocked as Fang to find herself in this situation. Her lower lip was split, and bruises were beginning to form on her body. Shallow scrapes decorated her elbow and knees. Plaster and fiberglass dusted the bathroom, the tub brimming with building materials. 

The strange girl didn’t have much in the way of clothes. She sported what looked like a kids’ nightgown, a green hoodie with sleeves that were too short, pink ankle socks, and a single combat boot with a broken zipper. Her long legs were just as beat up as the rest of her. Everything she was wearing was stained with mud and grass stains, and her hair was wet, even though the tub was dry as a bone. 

Fang squeezed the gun to reassure himself. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

The girl didn’t answer him. She looked up at him with wide, bewildered eyes, and it suddenly occurred to Fang that she was probably high on something. 

“Hey,” he prodded, backing up in case he needed to put the door between them. “How’d you get in here?”

The girl seemed to realize that required an answer. Her brows drew together as she focused. After a long moment of silence that she spent staring at the faucets, she seemed to find the word she needed. She had to focus before stringing together a sentence and, when she spoke, she paused between each word.

“I fell,” she said. Her voice was hoarse.

Fang looked up through the hole she’d left in the roof. He was on the top floor of the motel, with no other structures nearby. There was nothing she could have jumped or fallen from. Maybe she had just ended up on the roof, hit a weak spot, and tumbled through.

Fang decided that was the most likely answer, and she was probably on hard drugs. Still, she was bleeding now, and the cut on her knee looked deep. He didn’t step closer. “Yeah, I know you fell.”

She looked at him at last. Her eyes were focused now. Maybe she was sobering up after the tumble through the roof.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Fang assured her.

“Said the guy with the gun,” the girl said. 

Fang realized he was still holding it up between them. He lowered it when he realized it probably wasn’t helping her calm down. Then again, she didn’t seem afraid. She was confused.

Before Fang could ask any more questions, or even decide what to do next, the odd girl placed her hands on the sides of the tub, pulled her legs beneath her, and stood up. Despite being injured, she didn’t appear to be in bad health. In fact, she looked healthier than Fang, with enough meat on her bones to show she was well-fed. Beneath the gritty powder of plaster, she was perfectly normal, and probably not a crackhead. She stepped out of the tub, and roofing materials showered over the tile. 

Fang took a step back, but kept his gun pointed at the floor. Her lip was bleeding profusely now, but she didn’t seem to notice. To be fair, she seemed to be going through a lot at the moment.

She didn’t speak as she slowly walked forward. She walked a bit like Bambi with her legs too long, but she didn’t fall, despite the limp on her left side. She made it to the bathroom sink, then froze upon seeing her reflection. 

Fang watched with a combination of bewilderment and interest. 

The strange and filthy girl leaned forward and studied herself with obvious curiosity. “That’s me?” she asked softly, then cleared her throat and tried again. “That’s me.” 

Her voice had grown a bit stronger, and Fang suddenly wondered if she hadn’t spoken in a while. “Yeah, that’s you,” he confirmed weakly. “Are you surprised?”

“A little,” she countered, but didn’t bother explaining. She turned away from the mirror to focus on Fang. 

Reflected in the mirror, he caught a glimpse of her back. Two long gashes were torn straight through her gown and hoodie, about half a foot down her back between her shoulder blades. The wounds had soaked her back in deep crimson, but, just like every other injury she bore, she didn’t notice.

Fang returned to his crackhead theory. One time he’d seen a guy on a bad trip slam his head through a glass door, roll around in the shards, then get back up and continue running. People on hard drugs sometimes didn’t feel pain.

Then again, this girl wasn’t running or breaking things, except the roof. She might not have made any sense, but she was a functional person. If she kept bleeding like that, so might not be soon.

“You’re pretty beat up,” Fang observed.

“That’s what happens when you get flung out of the sky, smart one,” she said. She limped back to the tub and leaned over to look up at the hole in the ceiling. “Did you really have to take that guy’s wallet from the Prius? People in Priuses aren’t rob-worthy. You’re just a dick.”

Fang’s heart rate accelerated. How could she know? He held his gun tighter to keep his cool. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She looked away from the ceiling and focused on Fang. The longer she stayed, the more lucid she became. She’d certainly developed an attitude in the last two minutes. “Yes, you do. Don’t be a dick and a liar.” 

Fang knew his face was as unreadable as ever. He practiced keeping a straight face for occasions exactly like this one. It didn’t appear to deter the odd girl.

She looked at the ceiling again, then looked down at the tub. “You robbed that guy, back at the Piggly Wiggly. You didn’t see me, but I saw you.”

Fang tensed. She knew her shit, that was for certain. Now he just needed to figure out what she wanted. “Who are you?”

She squatted by the tub and rifled through the plaster bits. Apparently, the conversation no longer interested her. Her tone was flat. “You didn’t listen. I’m not that surprised, you don’t listen to things you don’t understand.”

Fang swallowed hard. “You don’t know me.”

She lifted her head, but didn’t look back at him. “Fang.” 

Just the way his name sounded from her tongue made him shiver. She said it with a familiarity that unsettled him, like she’d known it her whole life. 

She turned around and sat on her knees beside the tub. “Singular, sharp, and tough. You picked that name, and you’ll never tell anybody your real one, because you don’t like admitting you came from somewhere.”

How did she know? What was she? Fang gritted his teeth and told himself it didn’t matter, because he could shoot her if she made herself dangerous. “Who are you?” he growled. He hoped he sounded intimidating.

“I’m Max,” she said, like her name explained everything she was and what she was doing here. 

Fang waited for an explanation, but received none. “That’s not even a girl’s name,” he said. The half-insult didn’t soothe his nerves.

Max shrugged. “I don’t care.”

“What are you doing here?”

Max crossed her arms and regarded Fang from her spot on the bathroom floor. “I told you, stupid. You shouldn’t have robbed that guy in the Prius. You’ve screwed us both.”

Fang shook his head. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re beyond help,” Max said. She stood up, but blood stained the tub where she had been leaning against it. “I couldn’t save your soul no matter how hard I tried.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sad fax shippers, assemble. i will go to my grave writing AUs for them. also james patterson sucks :)


End file.
